5 Weird Effects of Daylight Saving Time

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As daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. this coming Sunday morning
(Nov. 3), most Americans will join snoozers across more than 60
other nations in savoring the gift of one extra hour of sleep.

Though the biannual ritual of turning clocks might feel like
second nature to us today, it is actually
a fairly new phenomenon that has only taken effect on a
global scale within the past several decades (though many
countries including Venezuela, Kenya and Saudi Arabia still don't
partake in it today).

Benjamin Franklin suggested the idea back in 1784, as a way to
economize on sunlight and burn fewer candles during winter
mornings and nights, but the practice did not become steadily
official in the United States until Congress passed the Uniform
Time Act in 1966, with the same intention of saving energy.
[ 5
Fun Facts About Daylight Saving Time ]

Whether or not the practice actually shrinks energy bills seems
to vary from state to state and remains up for debate today. What
seems more certain, however, is that the subtle time shift can
take a noticeable toll on the human
body. Here are the five strangest ways that daylight
saving time, and the ending of it, affect human health:

1. More car accidents?

An increase in car accidents during daylight saving time has been
both supported and refuted in the academic literature. The
general concept supporting the case, however, is that subtle
changes in sleep patterns and circadian rhythms can alter human
alertness and, in some cases, might increase the risk of
potentially fatal car accidents.

Still, one 2010 Journal of Environmental Public Health study that
analyzed the number of traffic accidents in Finland one week
before and one week after transitions into and out of daylight
saving time from 1981 through 2006 found no significant change in
the number of accidents during this time period. Another 2010
study published in the Journal of Safety Research found that
daylight saving time can actually result in fewer crashes by
increasing visibility for drivers in the morning.

Though this threat may not apply to those who work in the
relatively padded confines of carpeted office buildings, others
who work at more physically taxing jobs, such as miners, have
been shown to experience more frequent and severe workplace
injuries at the onset of daylight saving time in the spring. The
effect has not been detected at the end of daylight saving time
in the fall.

The 2009 Journal of Applied Psychology study that came to this
conclusion found that mine workers arrived at work with 40
minutes less sleep and experienced 5.7 percent more workplace
injuries in the week directly following the springtime daylight
saving transition than during any other days of the year. The
researchers attribute the injuries to
lack of sleep, which might explain why the same effect did
not pop up in the fall when workers gained an hour of sleep.
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3. More heart attacks

A team of Swedish researchers conducted a study in 2008 that
showed the rate of heart attacks during the first three weekdays
following springtime daylight saving time increased by about 5
percent from the average rate during other times of the year. As
with workplace injuries, the effect did not arise at the end of
daylight saving time in the fall.

In the 2008 New England Journal of Medicine article that
described this pattern, the researchers attributed the small
surge in heart attacks in the springtime to changes in people's
sleep patterns. Lack of sleep can release stress hormones that
increase inflammation, which can cause more severe complications
in people already at risk of having a heart attack.

4. Longer cyberloafing

Cyberloafing — the slang word for surfing the Web for personal
entertainment during work hours — may not be as life-threatening
as heart attacks and workplace injuries, but it can cost
companies thousands of salary wages flushed down the Internet
tube.

A 2012 Journal of Applied Psychology study found that the
incidence of cyberloafing significantly increased in more than
200 metropolitan U.S. regions during the first Monday after
daylight saving time in the spring, compared with the Mondays
directly before and one week after the transition. The team
attributed the shift to a lack of sleep and thus lack of workday
motivation and focus, but was not able to verify this
experimentally.

5. Increased cluster headaches

Circadian rhythms tick away throughout the body each day,
controlling the release of certain hormones that affect moods,
hunger levels, and yearning for sleep. When these rhythms get
thrown out of whack, even by just one hour during daylight saving
time, the human body notices the difference.

For some people, the effects of this change can set off
debilitating chronic pain. Cluster headaches, for example — or
headaches that cluster within one side of a person's head and can
cause excruciating pain for days or weeks at a time — seem to be
triggered by changes in circadian rhythms, including during the
transitions in and out of daylight saving, the
New York Daily News reported Friday (Nov. 1).